The Reel Argument: Carl Theodor Dreyer

By Bergotte

There is a filmmaker most people have never seen whose work contains some of the most powerful images in the history of cinema, and his name is Carl Theodor Dreyer. He made fewer than a dozen surviving features across forty years, worked in almost complete opposition to every commercial instinct the film industry has ever had, and produced a body of work so singular and so demanding that it exists in a category of its own — not difficult in the way that difficult films are usually difficult, not slow in the way that slow films are usually slow, but operating at a frequency so different from ordinary cinema that the first encounter can feel like learning to hear a new kind of music. Once you have heard it, nothing sounds quite the same.

Carl Theodor Dreyer was born in Copenhagen in 1889, the illegitimate son of a Swedish father and a Danish mother who died shortly after his birth, and he was raised by a series of foster families before finding his way, by the circuitous route that the early film industry made available to people without money or connections, into the Danish cinema of the nineteen tens and twenties. His biography matters less than it usually does for a filmmaker of his stature — he was reticent about himself, and the films, when you encounter them, feel less like personal expression than like acts of witness, as though Dreyer had stepped out of the way and allowed something to speak through him. What that something is — faith, or the memory of faith, or the ache of its absence, or something older and stranger than any of those descriptions — is the question his films spend their entire existence asking.

He is not, it should be said immediately, a filmmaker who requires specialist knowledge or patience of a peculiarly masochistic kind. He requires only that you slow down and pay attention, which is to say he requires the same thing that a great painting or a great piece of music requires, and the rewards of that attention are proportionate. To watch The Passion of Joan of Arc — made in 1928 and the film around which this essay turns — is to experience something that cannot be replicated anywhere else in cinema: a sustained act of human witness so intense that it becomes, for the duration of its running time, a form of shared suffering. Not comfortable suffering, not suffering aestheticised into pleasure, but the real thing, held on a human face until it becomes unbearable and then held a little longer, because Dreyer understood that the unbearable is where the important things live.

A face in extremis

The history of The Passion of Joan of Arc is almost as remarkable as the film itself. Dreyer, working in France with a largely French cast and crew, constructed an entire medieval village as a set and then barely used it, because once he began filming he became interested in almost nothing but the face of his Joan — a young stage actress named Maria Falconetti, in her only significant film role, who gave what is routinely and correctly described as the greatest performance ever captured on screen. The film covers only the final day of Joan’s trial and her execution, compressing the historical record into ninety minutes of close-up after close-up after close-up, faces filling the frame so completely that the medieval world Dreyer had built at considerable expense exists mostly as glimpsed fragments at the edges of shots, contextual rather than central.

This was a radical decision in 1928 and it remains radical now, because what Dreyer understood — what he bet the entire film on — was that the face, held close enough and long enough, is not a detail of the human story but its whole substance. Joan’s face is not a window onto her soul in some vague metaphorical sense. It is, in Dreyer’s hands, quite literally the site where the argument between human power and human faith is conducted. The judges who interrogate her are filmed from below, so that they loom and threaten; Joan is filmed straight on, at her own level, or sometimes slightly from above, so that she seems both vulnerable and, somehow, elevated. The camera’s relationship to a face is always a moral statement, and Dreyer knew this before almost anyone else.

Falconetti’s performance is impossible to describe without resorting to the language of experience rather than analysis. She was not a conventional beauty, and Dreyer’s camera makes no attempt to beautify her — her head is shaved for the execution, her face is frequently tear-streaked, her eyes carry a quality of openness that in a less extraordinary performance would read as blankness but here reads as the opposite: as a capacity for feeling so large that ordinary expression cannot contain it. There is a moment — one of many — when she has been told that her voices were false, that God has not spoken to her, that she is condemned, and the camera holds on her face as the information arrives, and what passes across her features is not the performance of grief but something rawer and stranger: the actual texture of a person discovering that everything they have built their life on may be a lie. Whether Dreyer achieved this through some extraordinary directorial technique or through some quality in Falconetti that he had the genius to find and the patience to wait for, the result is the same. You are watching a real human being at the moment of her most extreme experience, and the screen between you and her ceases to function as a screen.

The trial that never ends

What makes Joan of Arc more than a remarkable performance film — what makes it a work of genuine philosophical depth — is the way Dreyer structures the trial itself as an argument about the relationship between institutions and the individual soul. The judges who question Joan are not monsters. This is crucial, and it is one of Dreyer’s most unsettling choices. They are intelligent men, some of them genuinely troubled by what they are doing, some of them conducting what they believe, in their own terms, to be a sincere theological inquiry. The institution of the Church, in Dreyer’s rendering, is not evil — it is something worse: it is sincere, and its sincerity destroys Joan as surely as malice would. The film is not anti-religious. It is a meditation on what happens when the apparatus of religion — the hierarchy, the doctrine, the procedure — encounters a direct, unmediated claim of spiritual experience, and finds it intolerable.

Joan’s crime, in the end, is not heresy in any technical sense. Her crime is certainty. She knows what she heard, she knows what she was told to do, and no amount of pressure from men with more institutional power than she will ever have can make her unknow it. This is the thing that destroys her and the thing that, in Dreyer’s rendering, makes her holy — not sainthood in the official sense, not the posthumous canonisation, but holiness as a quality of intactness, of being unable to be made into something other than what you are. The film is, among everything else it is, a film about integrity as a form of martyrdom: about what it costs, in a world organised by power, to remain entirely yourself.

This theme runs through Dreyer’s work like a river running underground — audible if you know where to listen, shaping the landscape even when invisible. His 1943 film Day of Wrath, made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and generally and correctly read as an allegory of that occupation, centres on a woman accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Denmark, and the parallels between her situation and Joan’s are deliberate and exact. She too is brought before an institution that has already determined her guilt. She too is asked to confess to something she may or may not have done. And Dreyer, characteristically, refuses to resolve the question of her guilt or innocence, because the question of guilt or innocence is, he suggests, beside the point — the point is the machinery of accusation itself, the social and institutional structures that require certain people to be destroyed, regardless of what they have actually done.

Ordet and the possibility of miracle

The film that sits alongside Joan of Arc as Dreyer’s supreme achievement is Ordet — the Danish word for The Word — made in 1955 and winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, though it has never achieved the wider recognition it deserves. It is, on its surface, a deceptively simple film: a farming family in rural Jutland, two brothers, a father, a young woman who dies in childbirth, and another brother, Johannes, who has gone mad and believes himself to be Jesus Christ. The film moves slowly, in long unbroken takes, through the interior of the farmhouse and the surrounding landscape, and for much of its running time it operates as a quiet, serious drama about faith and doubt and the difficulty of love.

And then, in the final sequence, something happens that Dreyer films with such matter-of-fact directness, such complete refusal of dramatic inflation, that it is more disturbing and more moving than any amount of conventional cinematic spectacle could be. A miracle occurs. A genuine, unambiguous, physically literal miracle, presented not as fantasy or metaphor or the subjective experience of a believer, but as an event in the real world, observed by multiple witnesses, treated by the camera as simply and plainly as any other event in the film. Dreyer does not explain it. He does not contextualise it. He films it as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which is precisely the argument the film is making: that the miraculous is not supernatural in the sense of being outside nature, but is rather what nature looks like when we stop insisting that we already know what is possible.

Whether you find the ending of Ordet profoundly moving or intellectually intolerable will depend on things about you that have nothing to do with cinematic taste, and Dreyer knew this. He was not making an argument for the literal truth of Christian miracle. He was making an argument for the kind of openness to experience — the willingness to remain uncertain, to not close down possibility before it arrives — that is, in his cinema, the closest thing to wisdom that human beings can achieve. Johannes, the mad brother who believes himself to be Christ, is the fool who sees clearly — a figure Dreyer inherited from Dostoevsky and remade in his own image. The sane people around him are the ones who cannot see, because they have already decided what is real.

The long patience of the camera

To watch Dreyer is to be educated in a different relationship with time. His shots are long by any standard and very long by the standard of commercial cinema, and this length is not self-indulgence or the affectation of a filmmaker who wants to seem serious. It is a moral and philosophical position. The long take in Dreyer says: this person deserves more time than you are accustomed to giving. This moment deserves more attention. The world does not move at the speed of entertainment, and if you slow down to its actual speed, you will see things that faster cinema cannot show you.

This is most apparent in Gertrud, his final film, made in 1964 when Dreyer was seventy-five, and received at its premiere with incomprehension and something close to hostility. Audiences expecting the dramatic intensity of Joan of Arc or even the quiet tension of Ordet were confronted with something different: a film that moved with the deliberateness of a formal meditation, in which the camera observed two people in conversation with a patience that made every pause, every averted glance, every slight adjustment of posture as significant as anything they said. Gertrud tells the story of a woman who has decided to leave her husband for a younger man she loves, and who discovers that the younger man does not love her with the completeness she requires, and who chooses, in the end, to live alone rather than accept love on terms that diminish her. It is a film about a woman who insists on the full substance of what she wants from life and refuses to settle, and Dreyer films her insistence with a respect that is itself a kind of love.

The film was rehabilitated over the decades following its disastrous premiere, and it is now understood as what it always was: a summation of everything Dreyer believed about the relationship between form and feeling, between the camera’s patience and the depth of human experience. The long takes are not slow. They are exact. They take precisely the time they need, which is the time required to understand what is actually happening in the room between these people, beneath the words and the conventions and the social performances — to reach the real thing, which is always quieter and more devastating than the drama that surrounds it.

What Dreyer gave to cinema

The line of influence that runs from Dreyer is long and largely unacknowledged, which is one of the characteristic injustices of film history. Bergman, who followed him as the great Scandinavian filmmaker of spiritual crisis, knew his work intimately — the close-up as the site of spiritual revelation, the face as the primary landscape of cinema, the long take as an act of moral respect, all of these are Dreyer’s gifts to the tradition, received and transformed by Bergman into something new. Tarkovsky, the Russian filmmaker who pushed the metaphysical ambitions of European art cinema to their furthest extreme, described Dreyer as one of the essential precursors, the filmmaker who had understood before anyone else that cinema was capable of something more than narrative, that it could hold the sacred without flinching. Robert Bresson, the French filmmaker whose austere and devastating films about grace and suffering are among the glories of European cinema, is unthinkable without the example of Dreyer — not because Bresson imitated him but because Dreyer had already established that there was a way of making films in which beauty and austerity were not opposites but the same thing.

But Dreyer’s importance is not merely historical, not merely a matter of who he influenced and what he made possible. His films exist in themselves, fully and permanently, and what they offer to a viewer in the present is not the satisfaction of encountering a historical monument but the immediate, physical experience of cinema doing something it almost never does: telling the complete truth about what it is to be a human being confronting the largest questions — of faith, of love, of integrity, of mortality — without the protection of irony or the cushion of sentiment.

The filmmaker who waited

There is a practical fact about Dreyer’s career that illuminates his work as much as any analysis of his technique or his themes. He was, by the standards of any professional filmmaker, extraordinarily slow. In the fifty years of his working life he made fourteen feature films. This is not the output of a filmmaker who struggled to get work — though he did sometimes struggle — but of a filmmaker who refused to make a film until he had found the subject that required precisely the film he was capable of making, and who then refused to release it until it was what it needed to be. He spent years developing projects that were never made. He turned down commissions that would have given him a comfortable commercial career. He waited, with a patience that was in itself a form of artistic statement, for the work that was worth doing.

This waiting is audible in every frame of the films he eventually made. They have the quality of things that have been thought about for a very long time — not overworked, not laboured, but considered, in the same way that a sentence in a great writer’s late work has been considered: every word necessary, nothing present that should not be there, nothing absent that should. The economy of Dreyer’s cinema is not minimalism for its own sake. It is the economy of a man who knew exactly what he wanted to say and had waited until he found the only way to say it.

This, in the end, is what makes him essential and what makes him more necessary now than ever. We live in an era of cinema that has become expert at abundance — at stimulation, at sensation, at the filling of every available moment with event and image and sound. Dreyer offers the opposite: a cinema of subtraction, of silence, of the held moment, of the face that tells you more than the plot ever could. He offers the experience of being made to slow down to the speed of the real, and discovering that the real, at that speed, is not dull or empty but unbearably full — full of the things we miss when we move too fast, full of the human weight that ordinary cinema has neither the courage nor the patience to carry.

Go and find The Passion of Joan of Arc. Watch Falconetti’s face for ninety minutes and ask yourself whether you have ever seen anything more true on a screen. Then go to Ordet and wait for the ending and let it do what it needs to do to you. Then come back and argue that cinema is not capable of being a spiritual art form. Dreyer has already answered you.

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Sources and further reading

David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (1981) — the definitive critical study in English, rigorous and illuminating throughout.

Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer (1971) — an earlier critical account, valuable for its close attention to the films themselves.

Mark Nash, Dreyer (1977) — published by the British Film Institute, a concise and penetrating introduction.

Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum, My Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer (2000) — the most thorough biographical account available.

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Dreyer in Double Reflection — a collection of his own writings on cinema, essential for understanding the philosophical foundation of his practice.

For first-time viewers, the suggested order: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) first, without preparation, and let it find you. Then Ordet (1955). Then Day of Wrath (1943). Gertrud (1964) last, when you are ready to meet cinema at its most patient and its most profound.